In honor of Sunday’s warm-and-fuzzy hol­i­day, it seems fit­ting to dis­cuss dat­ing in col­lege. The New York Times recently pub­lished an insight­ful arti­cle about how the skewed female to male ratios at most uni­ver­si­ties affect dat­ing cul­ture. Over­all, the ratio remains approx­i­mately 60:40 (female: male).

Any­way, as described in the NYT, this can make for a rather quirky dat­ing cul­ture on col­lege cam­puses. When I saw this arti­cle, I went “Yes! Finally!” because I think that dat­ing in col­lege is some­thing that a) every col­lege stu­dent has thought about and b) few col­lege students/alumni want to dis­cuss. It’s awk­ward. It’s uncom­fort­able. It forces us to acknowl­edge the expec­ta­tions that we had for col­lege that may not have been met. It’s real life.

I def­i­nitely had high expec­ta­tions for dat­ing and social life in col­lege. After years of read­ing Sev­en­teen mag­a­zine and absorb­ing all of the promises that pop cul­ture had to offer, I assumed that col­lege would auto­mat­i­cally include first dates, clichéd strolls on the quad, and essen­tially the first big roman­tic rela­tion­ship that so many peo­ple pre­sume comes with the rest of the higher edu­ca­tion package.

I was wrong. I quickly became famil­iar with “hookup cul­ture” and real­ized that actual rela­tion­ships in col­lege now seem to emerge from a com­plex gray zone of par­ties, group dynam­ics, and a lit­tle too much time spent on Face­book. It was way more com­pli­cated than what I was pre­pared for and, to be hon­est, kind of over­whelm­ing and stressful.

Read­ing the arti­cle from the Times, how­ever, brings it all back. Before read­ing the arti­cle, I never really thought about how the skewed female to male ratio could put women in a posi­tion of height­ened vul­ner­a­bil­ity, but it does make sense and it totally fits with behav­ior I saw all the time as an under­grad. I’ve seen some incred­i­bly smart, savvy young women com­pro­mise their choices sim­ply because they were afraid of los­ing a boyfriend or even poten­tial boyfriend—and then when I’ve talked with my guy friends about this, it’s like we’re liv­ing in entirely sep­a­rate worlds. I do believe that many of the dynam­ics described in the arti­cle do not derive from neg­a­tive inten­tions on the part of male col­lege students—from what I have seen, they sim­ply are not aware of how dif­fer­ent it is for the female counterparts.

The arti­cle cites soci­ol­o­gist Kath­leen A. Bogle, who com­ments that in uni­ver­sity set­tings with so many more women than men, “… [women] are com­pet­ing for men on men’s terms…Since col­lege women say they gen­er­ally want ‘some­thing more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up los­ing out.”

This is an inter­est­ing state­ment and I would be cau­tious to “blame” col­lege men for the preva­lence of hookup cul­ture. I think it prob­a­bly resulted from a great many fac­tors. The most impor­tant point that I want to draw from this arti­cle is that dat­ing on col­lege cam­puses is sim­ply not what many incom­ing fresh­men expect. Then those expec­ta­tions often seem to get warped by what­ever dat­ing cul­ture exists on a given cam­pus. It dif­fers greatly from col­lege to col­lege depend­ing on size, loca­tion, and other fac­tors, but this is surely a topic wor­thy of fur­ther discussion.

The Times arti­cle also touched on the dif­fer­ences between var­i­ous types of schools and I think that it would be inter­est­ing to see par­al­lel arti­cles writ­ten specif­i­cally about these dif­fer­ent cam­puses: small schools vs. big schools, city schools vs. sub­ur­ban or rurally-located campuses.

Let’s hear what you think. How would you char­ac­ter­ize the dat­ing cul­ture on your col­lege cam­pus? What do you think of Dr. Bogle’s assessment?